The Rebellion of Paraguay (1721–1735) reveals much about imperial administration in eighteenth century Spanish South America. It demonstrates the contradictions built into an imperial structure in which a variety of people and groups with conflicting vested interests tried to influence policy. In the case of Paraguay, this situation contributed directly to rebellion. Although it sprang immediately from local economic grievances, the Rebellion was also caused by a jurisdictional dispute over who should direct the affairs of Paraguay, the audiencia of Charcas or viceroy of Peru. It thus raised the question of whom local inhabitants should obey when their superiors disagreed.

The late eighteenth century brought deep changes to the Atlantic World. Imperial competition, warfare, revolutions and a general increase in transatlantic commerce changed the balance of power among European empires and their overseas territories. The Spanish empire in particular faced multiple challenges, especially intermittent warfare and economic crises, which many historians regard as having paved the way for the Spanish American independence movements after 1808. Warfare in Europe and in the Atlantic weakened Spain's economy and its control over trade and administration in its American territories. Military conflicts in the 1790s and 1800s disrupted the commercial routes connecting the Peninsula and the colonies, forcing the opening of the colonial economies to foreign agents. Because of the perils faced by Spanish vessels crossing the Atlantic, the Castilian crown allowed colonial merchants to trade directly with foreign neutral nations. Apart from legal commerce, contraband trade also flourished.

In late 1809 and early 1810, die city of Caracas witnessed an extraordinary spectacle as over 350 men were marched into its prisons. Local provincialauthorities had apprehended these men as part of a leva de vagos, a campaign to coercively recruit vagrants into the army. Such recruitment campaigns were neither novel nor particularly controversial in the late Bourbon period. However, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 had unhinged the Spanish world, inspiring a profound re-examination of values and traditions. In this context, this new leva generated an unexpected opposition tliat stunned the new captain general of Venezuela, field marshal Vicente Emparan y Orbe. The opposition, which was led by the Caracas audiencia—the province's highest court—ostensibly questioned the legality of die procedures being used to validate charges of vagrancy, but beneath the surface, the resistance reflected a broadbased coalition dedicated to the defense of a status quo that was unraveling under the twin forces of Napoleon and the Junta Central. In this essay, I argue that the Leva de Vagos of 1809 contributed decisively to the overthrow of Emparan, paving the way for the creation of the Junta of Caracas in April 1810.

Modernizers in Cuzco, Peru, ushered in the twentieth century by exalting newspapers as a universal vehicle for peace, prosperity, and progress. Although the city stood at more than 11,000 feet above sea level in the remote and rugged southern highlands, editors, public officials, and intellectuals were convinced that small but plentiful local newspapers contributed to a robust international public sphere. The writer who in 1910 lauded the press as die “aurora of salvation of the people” that “propagates itself through time and distance to keep redemptive thought alive” was hardly alone in his cosmopolitan idealism or emancipatory zeal. In the decades to come, a flood of pretentious self-tributes conveyed the idea that newspapers were almost divinely appointed to propagate a modern liberal project.

A watershed in Peru's development, and perhaps its most traumatic experience as an independent republic, was its humiliating defeat at the hands of Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). The impact of the war was profound. Virtually every aspect of Peruvian political, economic, and social life was affected. The army was defeated, the country invaded, and Lima occupied. By the peace treaty, Peru's nitrate-bearing southern provinces were handed over to Chile, depriving it of its most important source of income. The economy of the country was further undermined by the war-time destruction of many coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Economic collapse was accompanied by political chaos. Fighting continued after the end of the war as forces loyal to General Andrés A. Cáceres, who had carried out an effective guerrilla campaign against the Chileans in the sierra, now aimed their guns at the Chilean-imposed government of General Miguel Iglesias. In December 1885 they captured Lima, paving the way for Cáceres' election as president.

On July 26, 1961, a mob of approximately 500 students affiliated with an anti-castrista group called “Mariano” gathered at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. After splashing the Cuban and Soviet embassies with red paint, they headed toward the School of Economics with the intent to burn an effigy of Fidel Castro. The activists timed their act to coincide with the inaugural celebration of the Mexican- Cuban Institute of Cultural Relations José Martí; the event itself was scheduled on the eighth anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack that sparked the Cuban Revolution. The anti-Castro protestors denounced the proceedings with chants and signs that read “A direct threat to Mexico.” Warning other students about the “the red hand” manipulated by the “despot Fidel,” the group condemned the entire July 26 Revolutionary Movement, calling it a continental menace that, if allowed to succeed, would introduce “communist tyranny to all Latin America.”

Prevalent scholarly studies of indigenous language documents from Mesoamerica's colonial times include the predominant argument that they were written by native scribes to protect community interests. The belief is that scribes performed as notaries in municipal councils to generate native language notarial documents as indemnity against possible infractions of their communities’ rights to possess property. Notarial documentation was usually extrajudicial, created by the municipal scribe for community protection and not for any specific litigation before a Spanish magistrate. Their writings represented internal municipal administration and the jurisdiction of the native cabildo (town council) within each republic of Indians. They could be utilized, if necessary, to bolster indigenous claims to their rights and privileges in litigation brought before Spanish officials.

The first Christian churches were built in the Andes soon after Spaniards arrived. Initially simple structures, they were later remodeled into large stone monuments. Aside from their architectural construction, the furnishing and decoration of these churches was an ongoing project that involved many participants, often under the watchful eye of a parish priest. Art historians have uncovered fascinating cases in which native artists exercised agency in creating works to be displayed in church interiors, many of which expressed Andean as well as Christian beliefs. This scholarship has focused primarily on the art forms of painting and sculpture, which were very visible within the church, especially in cases such as the baptism murals discussed by Ananda Cohen Suarez in this issue. An underappreciated yet equally notable aspect of church decoration was textiles. Throughout the colonial period churches were abundantly adorned with “church clothing,” textile ornaments meant to cover floors, walls, and altars as well as clothe church functionaries and religious statuary. The purchase and maintenance of church textiles consumed the lion's share of annual church budgets.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1616 El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno stands as the author's staggering attempt to obtain by privilege that which he could not secure through justice: status as a native lord and title to lands. Indeed, the last 20 years of the native chronicler's life as we know it, roughly from 1595 to 1615, are marked by the usual milestones of an ascending clerical career in the service of provincial priests, inspectors, and administrators from the south central Andean region stretching between Jauja and Huamanga.1

As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftop observatorio of his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon. Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from. When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12. Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.

When Harold Palmer Davis published his Black Democracy in 1928, after twelve years of study and of residence in Haiti, he wrote of Toussaint L’Ouverture that it would be impossible to form any true estimate of Toussaint’s character, because of the great mass of material that had been written about him from widely divergent and conflicting viewpoints.

“B. D. Q. C.,” as he signed his letter, must have felt pretty special that New Year's Eve of 1973. Some time that evening, the 15-year-old Communist boy from Santiago de Chile kissed a 17-year-old Communist girl admired for her beauty by all the young Communists from the local headquarters of the Juventudes Comunistas de Chile (JJCC), or Jota, as the youth wing of the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCH) was nicknamed. He had never dated an older woman before, and though he bragged about having kissed thousands of other girls, he had never truly fallen in love until then. “I dated her for only 13 days. We broke up, but every day that goes by I love her more and more,” he confessed in a letter to the editor of the young Communists’ magazine a few days later. To make matters worse for our lovelorn teenager, the object of his affection did not stay single for long. “She is now dating another guy from the Jota. Every day that goes by I grow more jealous of him and of everyone who talks to her, because even though I'm not with her any more, I dream we are still together, and I have hopes to be with her again.” The existence of a place like the JJCC local headquarters, which all the people involved in this romantic affair visited regularly, was the cause of both solace and affliction for this young man: “I waste the whole afternoon in the headquarters waiting for her to arrive and greet her, so my eyes can take her in. I think about her every minute, while she has thousands of things to think about, and I have only one.”